


Picture Frames

by Defnotmeyo



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Monday - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 15:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6381970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defnotmeyo/pseuds/Defnotmeyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes a picture frame is more permanent than a bulletin board tack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picture Frames

When they finally move back into the basement, all he can think about is redecorating. Removing the stench of the smoke, the smell of blood from the office. Tacking his pictures back up on the wall where they belong. Reinstituting his basketball to its proper corner. Saturn has been his favorite planet, and he still has that trophy from his three-man basketball glory days on the BSU squad. 

They’ve been through a bit to get back down to this hole. 

They’ve weathered Antarctica, an abdominal gunshot wound, and a decontamination shower. He’s almost kissed her, he’s told her he loves her, and he’s been called out by the geekiest weatherman known to mankind. Bill Paxton from Twister, Holman is not. 

Their construct of silence, hers more than his, has torn him down. 

When he speaks, she turns away. When he’s silent, she stares and implores him. Mulder doesn’t know anymore, when to ask for her to speak up and when to just walk away. He’d like to say he’s done, but he wasn’t lying when he said he couldn’t give up and yet couldn’t do it alone anymore. 

He wants to shake her. That didn’t mean, “Alone but with anyone.” It didn’t mean Diana was a fair substitute. But to call her on her jealousy would certainly send her the other direction.

Mulder’s not an idiot. And despite what most think, he’s also not dense. He’s a top notch behavioral profiler for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His profiles have brought down serial killers, and then been studied at Quantico. Despite ostracizing himself from the Bureau, when they can’t crack a case, he still gets the phone call. He has profiled his partner again, and again, and again. 

He hates himself for not only knowing how to push every button in her book, but for occasionally using that knowledge. Mulder is impulsive but never stupid. And when he jumps out of his chair and follows her down his apartment hallway, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Up until the moment the air changes between them and he leans in for the kiss. Then well… Well shit he really doesn’t know exactly what he was thinking at that point.

And when he begins his tentative seduction, under the gentle influence of some amazing hospital drugs, armed with the knowledge that she would have kissed him back, he begins with an “I love you.” It’s a bit of a fucking fast pitch. He’s impulsive, after all. 

But not stupid. And her rolled eyes and “Oh, Brother,” don’t completely surprise him.

Okay, so maybe he should put them back in their element. He tosses them in a car and drives Scully out to Groom Lake. And really… well really nothing happens. Other than her telling him they are living anything other than the normal life she actually wants to live. He feels like something else happened out in the desert, but really… well he got a bed. That’s about it.

So if trundling around and pissing off Kersh doesn’t work, he might as well loop her in at the holidays. He’s looking for any sign at this point, any flare that reminds him of the hallway. He’s not desperate but he is opportunistic. And he does miss her when she’s not around. Mulder jacks her keys and tells her a story about hounds baying in the wood, and then. Well they almost kill each other. Such is life.

They spend Christmas eve into Christmas morning together, but she wrestles herself from sleep against his shoulder and chest early in the morning to drive to her mother’s and the spell is broken. And when a fluff case in Kroner, Kansas pops up, Mulder doesn’t hesitate. Although they spend the night shoulder to shoulder, shuffling to the old time blues, he doesn’t necessarily appreciate being called out by Holman Hart, either. 

Mulder is reevaluating his knowledge base. She was about to kiss him back. She would have. But it was almost certainly a stress reaction, he is sure at this point. He’s tested, poked and prodded at her. Trying to gauge her reaction. He’s not an idiot, but he’s not confident, either and now his doubts start to crash in on him. Scully has withdrawn everything she said in his hallway, in Texas, and in front of OPR.

He doesn’t realize, could never know, that she’s burst in on every even immeasurably quantifiable moment between Diana Fowley and him. Diana has impeccable timing. She knows when to hold his hand. When to whisper in his ear. When to agree. When to shut Scully down. 

None of any of it matters when a bullet tears through her guts. 

Skinner gets to him first. 

“Mulder, I need to see you upstairs.”

He laughs. “Must be some damn big shit piles to pull me up to your office, boss.” 

He’s called Skinner ‘boss’ since they’ve been transferred over to Kersh. It is one of his little rebellions.

Skinner’s jaw clinches, which is not altogether unusual, so Mulder still isn’t too worried. Until they step in the elevator. Until he realizes his phone hasn’t rung for the past two hours. He felt like he’d been checking it obsessively. And they don’t even reach Skinner’s floor before Mulder presses Stop.

“What happened to her?”

“Agent Mulder, let’s-“

He shoulders Skinner into the corner, which Skinner mostly allows to happen, but Mulder’s always been a little stronger in Scully-rage. “WHAT…. Happened to her?”

Skinner doesn’t let him go to the hospital alone.

Mulder doesn’t really think of Diana Fowley, and the shit storm she created, after that point. Not when his focus becomes on not tearing Peyton Ritter limb from limb in the hospital hallway. Not when he challenges his partner to a thumb war, over her recovering abdomen. 

And Mulder, while mostly not blind, still is human, and still gets angry and defensive when Scully calls him to the table in front of his only three friends in the world. He’s not an idiot. No one goes after a person the way Scully went after Diana subsequent that decom shower unless there is something personal behind it. But that doesn’t stop him from being indignant and pissed off that he’s possibly been wrong for a decade of his life. 

Scully leaves the Gunman’s hole. 

Frohike – “God dammit, Mulder…”

“Frohike, I KNOW. I fucking know, okay?” He began this tentative seduction after being lifted from the sea. It started with an I Love You and has ended with this shit he’s helped create. Maybe the I Love You was too hard of a volley. Especially with everything   
else they’ve been through this year. 

He has his work and he has her. They used to be equally important but they are both still highly important, even if she has eclipsed the work in net value. He can’t lie that he’s happy they’re back in the basement. They’ve fought a lot in these walls, but they’ve talked, too, and talking is something they weren’t doing recently, cooped in the bullpen.

Dana Scully and her emotions have never been measured in grand gestures, Mulder has learned. She’s iced tea in a bag. His name is Fox but she’s the one that darts behind camouflage when you get passed the guns and the scalpels. Scully would take a bullet for him and put a bullet in him but god forbid he call her on her feelings about his ex… well okay ex-wife but she doesn’t have to know that yet.

His moments forward with Scully have always been carried in subtlety.

He gave up his gun before Modell. Her hands over his.

Her hand through his chopped hair in a parking garage.

A hundred benches when they were first torn apart.

A shoulder against hers after her father died.

And, right before she finally acquiesced to him, in his hallway, a hug and a forehead. 

Subtle.

‘Alright Scully. We’re gonna go at your pace,’ Mulder thinks, as he puts their office back together. She doesn’t realize how permanent she is with him. He gets that. He hasn’t made it easy on her. 

He doesn’t have his poster. It was gone in the fire. But he still has Saturn. He still has Big Foot. And he still has his basketball. 

Beyond that, Mulder has a picture. The Gunmen saved it for him. 

He can still smell the smoke as clear as day. He can still feel the sweat drip down his face when he pulled the vending machine back from the wall. He can still see her shout in his face, “There’s no time!” The blast radius bangs into the police cruiser and he is right back in Dallas. Before he worked up the balls to kiss her. 

Since then, they’ve been on ghost ships, in showers together, and delivered a baby in a hurricane. Scully is no closer to him than she was then, and that’s mostly his fault, he’s pretty sure. 

Alright Scully. You need to know you’ve got a place here, in this office. It’s not a desk, but at least you’re not tacked up on the wall. I might not have my fucking poster back, but you’re at least getting a picture frame.

“My uh… waterbed sprung a leak and shorted out my alarm clock.” 

Her eyes cut to the side, confused. 

Days or months or years later, who knows how many Mondays they took to get it right, she will amble down into the office before Mulder will. Under the corkboard, on the desk up against the wall, she will cut her eyes to a black picture frame. They will be standing in inescapably uncomfortable blue FBI windbreakers, in front of a Dallas rubble, her arms crossed and him pointing defiantly behind her. 

She’s just saved him, a thousand times over.

And so, the day after they stop Bernard from blowing up the bank, Scully finally takes a minute’s pause at the newest picture to be framed in their basement. Their shoulders are turned together. The background is federal building rubble. But there is only one other picture Mulder has ever had framed on his desk: his lonely picture of his sister.

When Skinner calls the basement phone and says, “Agent Scully, I’ve got some undercover work for you two, today,” she doesn’t care what it is. 

They’ve weathered explosives, bullets, ghosts, sinking ships, and his bitch of an ex. A framed picture from Fox Mulder tells her all she needs to know. She turns from the phone and he’s got his arm strung across the door frame, a couple of sunflower seeds tucked into his bottom lip and a cocky fucking smile stretched across his face. 

She walks under his arm and towards the elevator.

“So… whatcha think Scully? Monica and Chandler or Rob and Laura?” 

She braces the door. “Get in the damn elevator, Mulder.”


End file.
